Hardware

Northbridge: Intel 440BX

Southbridge: Intel 82371EB

Super I/O: Winbond W83977EF

To check the hardware the way LinuxBIOS sees it, I used already made programs that LinuxBIOS offers. As I use Gentoo, I hacked up a few ebuilds that install the latest svn versions of these programs. You can find them on this Gentoo Forums thread.

# superiotool -dV

Superiotool showed me which (if any) Super I/O chip is on the motherboard.

# flashrom -V

This tool showed me which ROM chip is used in the mainboard, and whether Flashrom supports it.

Build process

Checkout and Patching

After you get all the data from your computer by looking with eyes on the motherboard and checking the same things with the above programs, you need to do the following.

Make yourself a directory and checkout the svn repository for LinuxBIOSv2:

Building LinuxBIOS

We ended in the motherboard's directory, where the linuxbios.rom file resides now.

Flashing LinuxBIOS

Let's put the newly made linuxbios.rom file on the ROM chip. Be sure you have the right ROM chip in the board, so you don't accidentaly ruin your original chip.

Then do

# flashrom -wv linuxbios.rom

Reboot

Now reboot the machine and see if it boots ok.

When I did the above procedure my LinuxBIOS made use of only 64 MB of RAM. Some additional patches are still needed (this is being worked on).

But the result is fantastic anyway. Usual time for boot was long, 10-15s at least, now its close to 0s.

This work is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version. This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.